Department of History and International Studies

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Health Security, ‘Big Pharma’, and the Integrity of Psychotropic Drugging: The Historical ‘Commodification’ of Mental Well-being and ‘Medicalisation’ of nonexistent Disease Conditions.
(Department of History & International Studies Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria, 2020) Fyanka, Bernard
The strategic implications of health to national security is one of the key correlates of the elements of state power and as such the dynamics regarding the type and quality of population is critical to measuring the strength of population as an element of state power. To this end, mental health plays a key role in reference to population quality. Globally mental health has emerged as both a social and security risk with the integrity of psychotropic drugging in question. This paper will historically interrogates the earliest entanglement of capitalist interest in the form of Big Pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) in psychiatry’s struggle for scientific legitimacy. The rise of psychotropic's within psychiatric practice is analyzed in relation to the damaging effect it has on populations. The predominance of ‘disease mongering’ and the ‘medicalization’ of life’s problems is presented as a key compromising quality of a system that is multiplying the global security risk factors.